The Power and The Powder: Inside Reed Hastings’ Life After Netflix

A year after the billionaire exited Hollywood, he is finally ready for a closeup on his next acts: one as a world-changing philanthropist, another as the tamer of an untameable mountain.

Up nearly 9,000 feet in the Utah sky, the yurt-shaped lodge atop Powder Mountain offered an expansive vista when I arrived in mid-January, showing dozens of icy peaks stretching across four states. A blizzard had just dumped several feet of snow across the 10,000-acre luxury ski resort, worsening travel on the mountain’s infamously steep roads. As a matter of fact, the storm had prompted a warning from the mogul who owns the mountain, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings: Ditch the underequipped rental car, he advised me, and instead hire one of Powder Mountain’s experienced drivers.

Hastings, who spends about half the week in his 5,500-square-foot mansion down the road, knows from personal experience about the local weather’s potential severity. A few days earlier, he had found himself stranded in his hybrid Toyota Highlander, facing horizontal winds and zero visibility. Eventually, the same driver who picked me up came to his aid in Big Blue, a Jeep equipped with snow lights and triangular, tanklike treads.

“That was wild. We closed the road, and then we all just hung out,” Hastings recalled cheerfully, seated in one of the lodge’s panoramic rotundas. We snowshoed to each other’s houses. It’s a mountain community.”